One of the great things about advocates is that you can completely ignore them and they will still love your brand, buy your products and tell others about it. Imagine what would happen if you spent just a little time getting to know your advocates and showing them that you care.
The question you may be asking yourself is “well, how do I find these advocates?”
The great news is that they do exist.
They are just dormant. Even better, is that there is technology available today that will help you identify and empower them.
Zuberance
One my favorite such tools is Zuberance. This is a tool that you can use to not only identify advocacy but also empower them through offers, discounts or simply sharing branded content online. The way it works is simple.
Basically, you can leverage your owned media channels such as blogs, communities, Twitter or even your .com site (either through editorial or a piece of creative) that simply says “Hey, we want to hear from you!” or “Your feedback is valuable to us!” The call to action would be accompanied by a link to a branded page that asks the following question: How likely are you to recommend my product?
Users would then be able to choose between 0 – 10 and what they select will determine the next step in the flow. If they choose 0 – 6, they are considered a detractor. Now, their feedback might not be what you want to hear but it’s just as valuable. They could be easily routed to page that captures their feedback and it can be stored and sent to the customer support department for follow up.
If they choose 7 – 8, they are considered passives. Of course it’s impossible to assume how detractors really feel about your brand. They may not hate you but don’t love you either. Maybe they just tolerate you for now. For detractors, you can do just about anything within the flow (i.e. ask them to join you in other communities or send them a discount code).
Now if the users select a 9 – 10, they are considered advocates. These are people that you really want to pay attention to and empower. Within the flow, you can ask them to write a review, share a story, offer a discount code and then empower them to share their stories within their social circles. The great thing is that you can create any flow that you want and even change it up if it’s not working the way you anticipated.
Rowfeeder
When you think of Rowfeeder, you may think that it’s great for metrics and spits out raw data in an excel spreadsheet or a fancy graph. While this is true, there is another effective way to use the tool – that is, to find the people on Twitter that are talking about your brand.
What Rowfeeder doesn’t do is a sentiment analysis of the conversations about your brand. It merely tells you who is talking about your brand and how often. So, this requires a set of eye balls to go through the data and classify the conversations manually. While this may take a some sweat equity, it’s probably good practice for you and your teams so that you can really understand the conversation surrounding the brand.
The tool is really easy to use. You simply add in a keyword and then let it do its thing. For example, you can plug in “my product” and a date range and then Rowfeeder will report on all the tweets for that reporting period, including @replies, @mentions or simply brand mentions. Once you export that data in excel, you can do your magic and filter and sort the data any way you like. To find advocates, you simply sort by username to see the frequency at which these people are talking about your brand. If the conversation is negative, it’s a good opportunity to reach out to them and try to fix the problem.
Using Rowfeeder requires work. Mainly because it’s not a tool that’s going to do anything more than give you data. Hopefully, you are thinking long term and crafting engagement strategies that not only empowers advocacy but also finds and fixes the problems for your customers.]]>